Category Archives: Agile outsourcing

Do Soft Skills Really Matter in IT?

10 December 2013 Agile outsourcing

IT is viewed by many people as being something technical. They have a vision of managers with lot’s of plans, documents and spreadsheets, and nerds that are sitting behind their computer doing the “real work”. It may be out there, but I don’t see that often. What I see are people working together to deliver software solutions that work, which help their customers in their daily work, and deliver business value to the company. Communication and collaboration is essential to make the people that are doing this successful. So for me, soft skills really matter in IT! What do you think?

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What’s an Agile Retrospective and Why Would You Do It?Wat is een Agile Retrospective en waarom zou u het doen?Was ist eine agile Retrospektive und warum würden Sie sie anwenden?

6 November 2013 Agile outsourcing

The agile manifesto proposes that a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. But sometimes teams struggle to figure out what an agile retrospective is? And they wonder why they should do them? Without further ado, here’s an introduction to agile retrospectives, to help you to get started with them.

The Agile Retrospective

An agile retrospective, or sprint retrospective as Scrum calls it, is a practice used by teams to reflect on their way of working, and to continuously become better in what they do.

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Mature or capable: What really works? Volwassen of Capabel: Wat werkt nu echt?Mogna eller kapabla: Vad är det som verkligen fungerar?Reif oder kompetent: Was wirklich funktioniert?

9 October 2013 Agile outsourcing

Organizations want to mature their IT or R&D software development and do that by using CMMI for example. They set a goal: we have to get at CMMI level 3! And expect that their employees do whatever they can to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always go like that. Why do you want to mature, “what’s in it for me” is the question an employee will ask himself. What does work is the improvement of skills, by helping employees to become more capable. The CMMI continuous with CMMI Roadmaps makes this possible.

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Steering Product Quality in Agile TeamsHet sturen van product kwaliteit in Agile TeamsKontrollera produktkvalitet i agila teamProduktqualität in Agile Teams steuern

11 September 2013 Agile outsourcing

Few months ago I published a blog on Measuring and controlling product quality for iterative large(r) projects. I made a promise to blog about how we steered product quality in Agile teams, using Fault Slip Through. The approach is to reduce quality risks by deciding in the planning game when and how to invest in Quality. Let’s take a look how you can steer product quality in Scrum teams.

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Success Factors for Using Scrum and Getting BenefitsSucces factoren van het gebruiken van Scrum en voordelen hieruit halenFramgångsfaktorer av att använda Scrum och få ut fördelar av det Erfolgsfaktoren für die Nutzung von Scrum und davon profitieren

12 August 2013 Agile outsourcing

There are organization who struggle to get Scrum implemented and used, and have difficulties to adopt agile ways of working. While the Scrum framework looks simple, getting people to work in an agile way with Scrum and getting benefits out of it appears to be difficult for some organizations. But I also see organizations that are successful with Scrum and agile, and which have found better ways to implement it.

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